vROps and Slack – Collaborate your Ops

Slack is hot! I see it with customers, me and my wife teams are using it (she work as a java developer at eBay BTW), and I also starting to see it in traditional IT. I also love vROps so I thought to myself, hey, why not leverage Slack to display vROps alerts and make collaboration more efficient?!

For me, Slack is a mix of Twitter, Facebook, good old emails and bunch of other various tools and apps. In my opinion, It represents Collaboration 2.0. It can be integrated with almost anything and being used by development, DevOps, tech support teams and more.

The vROps part is very common in IT. Of course, there are other tools but let’s face it, if you work for/with a VMware shop, you probably have it or at least started to play with it. In my home lab (the infamous xLab) I also run it. Since I love working with Slack I thought of trying to integrate between the two and see how much potential it can have for evolving traditional IT teams. The requirement I had to myself is pretty simple. Make vROps critical alerts appear in my home lab slack channel. The process is as follow:

vROps critical alerts gets generated.

vROps send me an email to my IMAP account.

IMAP rule forwards this email to my Gmail account and gets tagged.

zapier takes this email and post it on my Home Lab private Slack channel.

Now, if you are not familiar with zapier go ahead and read my previous post although this post is just as well easy to understand. First thing first, lets configure vROps email plugin.

Next, create a notification with will fire up an email when a critical alert gets created.

The only thing left to do in vROps is to generate a critical alert, we will get to that in a second but before that let’s create the Slack team and channel. In my case, the Team will be named “My Home Lab” and the channel “#vrops”. Go to Slack website, signup and start by creating a new team.

Create a new channel by hitting the + sign.

Cool, before creating out zapier ZAP, generate any kind of vROps alert which will match your vROps notification setting. In my case, critical alerts are the ones I am looking for so I just disconnected one of my ESXi uplinks.

As you can see, email was sent and via simple Outlook rule this gets forwarded to my Gmail where I tag emails coming from vROps as “Home Lab – vROps”.

Final thing is to create the vROps and Slack integration using zapier ZAP. In our case, the Gmail email will be the trigger which will generate an action. This will the Slack, posting the email in the #vrops channel.

Since I already have the tag configured in my Gmail account, zapier can see it.